Tag Archives: photo editing

I looked at yesterday’s picture a second time after it was posted and was rather disappointed. I think the posted version looks muddy to me – which makes some sense because a RAW file has no added sharpening, contrast or saturation adjustments. Here’s a comparison of what was posted vs. what I think it should look like.

Color may still be off because I lost my calibrations when the computer crashed a few weeks ago and haven’t taken the time to redo them yet. For additional reference, the third picture is the jpeg straight from the Camera, which had a slightly different idea of the color balance than I did.

Artprize 2013 shot of the Grand River from downtown Grand Rapids – if you look close you can see the monkey sculptures hanging on the blue bridge. This one is not multiple shots, though I adjusted the tone curves enough that it is probably considered HDR.

It was supposed to rain on Saturday, so we didn’t really hurry to get up and going. Turns out, that forecast was wrong and we probably could have gotten an earlier start.

We had noticed that there was an NOC (Nantahala Outdoor Center) building on the border of the park just in Gatlinburg. I was unaware that NOC had physical stores – I thought they were an online only entity – but since it was there it got added to our list of things to do. We stopped in mainly just to browse, and because I wanted a less warm hat than the one I was forced to use the day before.

Day 2’s itinerary really only had two items on the list: wake up and go watch the sunrise and then hike a portion of the Appalachian Trail starting at Clingman’s Dome. We were able to get up early enough to do the sunrise thing in spite of the previous nights minimal sleep. I haven’t done a lot of sunrise photography, but I’m happy with the pictures I got. Continue reading →

We headed south out of Chicago starting at around 9:30PM (central) and traded off driving through the night to the Smoky Mountains. Janet started out driving and I attempted, with limited success, to sleep. This is admittedly an obnoxious way of going on vacation, but it does help compress things into a long weekend.

Because it was asked… left/top as posted yesterday, right/bottom slight adjustment to the reds. I think it does look better slightly desaturated – but that also might be because I’m viewing it on a monitor that washes out details once it gets to a certain level. I don’t have the magic within the constructs of my photo gallery plugin to do the mouse over trick, sorry. Oh, but I can do this:

There’s nothing specifically important about this picture. It was taken at the end of a hike as we were coming off the “primitive trail” out of the fins in Arches National Park. It’s a pretty obvious HDR shot, but in this case I think that’s OK, or at least OK enough that I like it, thanks largely to the fun cloud swirls.

Side note – this was shot as one of several at f/8.0 to avoid the camera deciding it wanted to vary the aperture and thus depth of field between shots. Noticing that reminds me of an article I came across a month or so ago: “f/8 and be there…“

Shot of a water buffalo that we saw on the India safari shortly after the farmers shown yesterday. This guy was out there alone and didn’t seem the least bit aggressive, but I really am not 100% certain how OK he was with me being there. I also wasn’t *that* close since this was at the longer end of the longest lens I have.

This one’s an obvious HDR – but in defense of unnatural post-processing, it looks better than any of the individual shots, regardless of how much processing is done to them. I’ve shared the picture before, here & here because apparently when we’ve stayed in Eindhoven, Netherlands for work, we always stay int the same hotel and on the same side of the hotel at that. Blaming jet lag, I was apparently up early enough to bother taking a photograph of the sunrise over whatever little portion of Eindhoven this is.

Some google-fu leads me to conclude that this is the Holy Heart Church in the foreground. Some basic logic leads me to believe this picture would be better if it didn’t have a portion of rooftop in the lower left corner and an office building in the right.